We live in interesting times.

We live in interesting times.

Boris Gulko

            Something extraordinary is happening in American politics.  The mechanism instituted by the founding fathers, where the people decide every 4 years, whose candidate for president they like more and 4 years later the country's course can be changed,  the mechanism that worked smoothly up to now, suddenly stalled. Immediately after Trump assumed the post, the opposition started a fierce attack on the new President. Its unconcealed purpose is his  impeachment. The behavior of the anti-Tramp establishment, unanimously called "hysteria", is fraught with mystery.

            The successes of the opposition are great - already in the first months of Trump's presidency, they managed to establish a special prosecutor to investigate the alleged crime of Trump's election campaign – its collusion with the Russian authorities, which secured the site of a Democratic National Committee – DNC, and the publication of stolen documents, a Republican victory. The special prosecutor, the former FBI director Robert Muller, assembled a team of lawyers, for some reason all of them Democrats, and without any delay, appointed two juries for interrogation of suspects. Why two? The jury in Virginia consists mostly of whites, and the Washington jury consists entirely of blacks. Blacks are well known for considerably more severe attitudes towards white suspects, rather then their brothers in race.

            An outsider may wonder: what is so terrible about the crime in which Russians are accused? Russian hackers are believed to have told the world that Hillary Clinton is a fake candidate who won the primaries thanks to the scam of DNC and its chairman, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (DWS). Her successor to the post of DNC chair, Donna Brazile gave Hillary questions that should have been asked in the debate the next day. One may think that to expose the crooks is a good thing?

            In addition to this noble deed, the Russians, having sabotaged Hillary, displayed some other noble features. After all, the Clinton couple long since has been owned by them. There is a half a million in Bill’s pocket for his visit to Moscow (according to other publications it was $800,000), and tens of millions, granted by Russian generals-philanthropists to the Clinton Foundation - after Hillary allowed to sell  20% of American-owned uranium mines to Russia. What did the Russians have on Trump? Only some dirt that he, while in Moscow, for reason unknown, persuaded prostitutes to pee on the bed Obama slept in.  And then - slept or didn’t, on this bed or some other bed, wrote or did not write, in general - it's all nonsense, a material suitable only for the progressive American media, not a serious compromising material.    

            But still, such an accusation - collusion with the Russians - looked serious, with the appropriate support of the media, it threatened impeachment. And suddenly, in one moment, it all collapsed. More over, it became clear that it was about serious crimes, but… committed by the wrong people. This explains the protracted hysterics of the losers of the election. Hillary's victory would cover those crimes. It seems that the group of some gentlemen of very high standing faced prison, and the entire Democratic Party and its press were indelibly disgraced.

            On August 9^th a very left-sided magazine “The Nation” placed on its website, and probably in paper form - I didn’t check, a significant amount of the article by Patrick Laurence Twitter "Great questions about last year's kidnapping of information from DNC computers", with the subtitle: "Former Experts at the National Security Agency (NSA) say that it was not kidnapping that happened, but a leak -- the inner work of someone with access to the DNC system." And on August 11^th  a respectable site “Bloomberg”, also leftist, but not as intensely left, published an article by Leonid Bershidsky,  called "Retired American spies do not believe the  Russian story",  offering an interpretation of the intriguing plot from “The Nation”.

The articles report on the findings of the organization "Veterans of intelligence for common sense" (VIPS), founded in 2003, which consists of 30 retired leading experts of espionage agencies of the United States. Experts announced: information from the computer DNC on July 5, 2016 was removed by someone who worked with this computer, and not by any hackers. For 87 seconds, someone transferred to the portable device 1,976 megabytes of information that  translated at a speed of 22.6 megabytes per second. American Internet providers aren’t capable of such speed.

            But why should you trust VIPS experts, not Obama’s special services, who discovered Russian hackers? Bershidsky explains: VIPS experts are specific people with the loudest names in the industry, ready to answer for their conclusions, unlike the anonymous "no one", to whose opinions the Obama administration referred, who discovered the "Russian trace".

I quote an article on the Bloomberg website: "The January statement by the US intelligence community (which was still under Obama), which served as the basis for accusing Russia of cracking the elections, states among other things: "We estimate with a high degree of confidence that the Russian military intelligence (GRU) using the person Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks.com, published the information received in cyber-operation and transferred it for

VIPS experts suggest that in fact, after Julian Assange of WikiLeaks announced on June 12, 2016 intended to publish materials related to Hillary Clinton, DNC hastened to fabricate evidence that their site was hacked by Russia. To defuse any potential disclosures of WikiLeaks, according to this theory, DNC created the online figure Guccifer 2.0, which published online mostly harmless DNC materials. Guccifer 2.0 was associated with Russia in that it used in its files a Russian meta-date and a virtual private computer network in Russia."

Analysts of VIPS showed that the content of the mythical Guccifer files at some point were cut and pasted into the Microsoft Word format, which uses the Russian language. He proved this in a discussion with experts held in early July.

Julia Latynina, a notable Russian journalist, was convinced by the fact that the mythical hackers worked and took breaks on the Moscow schedule. It was a clever invention by the hoaxers.

                  But someone kidnapped the data from the DNC computer.  The first candidate for this is obvious: on July 5^th the data was copied, and five days later IT (information technology) worker, DNC’s 26-year-old Jew Seth Rich was killed. It can be assumed that the young idealist had a hard time surviving the DNC scam he observed about his "candidate" Sanders.

                  The police decided the robbery was the motive for the murder, although nothing was stolen from the victim. The investigation of the crime was blocked by the Federal Deputy Prosecutor for the District of Columbia, who by the astonishing coincidence happened to be the brother of Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Parents of the murdered, after a failed first attempt, said they don’t want to investigate their son’s murder and accept the robbery version.

                  But someone killed Rich.  It is unlikely that the Debbie Wasserman Schultz or Hillary themselves stole at night with a gun to kill the traitor of DNC. Surveillance camera had shown two people, but the image was erased in a hurry by the police.  DWS was supporting criminal family from Pakistan, Imram Avan, his three brothers, their two wives and couple of their friends. Working as IT specialists either for 30, or for 80 Democrats in Congress (the figures vary in different publications), as well as for DNC, the Pakistanis stole equipment and other things (bank scams, some loans) for the amount close to $4 million dollars. They received a salary, for some reason, four times higher than other similar IT specialists in Congress. The family is connected either to the Pakistani intelligence service or with the Muslim Brotherhood - which does not contradict each other. Since February there has been an investigation of the family, and all the Democrats fired them. In addition to the FESH, who carried Imram Avan in his service as an IT worker no longer - it was impossible - but he continued as an adviser and went on to have an access to secret information in the Congress network. But then FBI arrested him when he was trying to leave US on a plane.

                  Rich wasn’t killed by professionals. There were two killers, but the injuries he sustained, according to the intern in the hospital, were not fatal. What happened to Rich in the hospital is a shrouded in mystery.

                  Michael Veller[A1]  several months ago in an article published  in “Moscow Echo” brought on a long list of mysterious deaths of people crossing Clintons’ path. Seth Rich is yet another name on that list. Perhaps the Clintons are just that lucky?  The minute they found out  the guy revealed negative information about Hillary, some robbers came over and killed him and ran,  having forgotten to take his money.

                  A site One America News Network, remembering Rich, said that recently two more enemies of the Clintons - Peter Smith, who completed the restoration of 33,000 e-mails erased from the computer by Hillary, and Ever Vine, the adviser to the President of Haiti, who was due in the same week to testify in court about the Clinton corruption - the money allocated by the US government to help Haiti after the devastating earthquake of 2010, both were  found  in the trunks of the Clinton Foundation – both committed suicide. Such is the success of the American noble family.

                  Corruption, deceit of society, even murder – those crimes are terrible, but the consequences are not the most serious. The heavier ones are those that harm national interests. Obama learned on January 17, when he had to rule 3 days, from a letter from VIPS experts that the Russian track in the DNC date stolen is fictitious. They wrote to him: "The NSA (National Security Agency) owns programs that are fully capable of intercepting all electronic messages. We strongly recommend that you require the NSA to prove that WikiLeaks has been transferred the results of Russian hacking. If the NSA can not bring such evidence - and quickly - then it means, probably, that such evidence does not exist." It is clear that NSA employees closely monitor the activities of WikiLeaks.

                  The letter convinced Obama. The next day, the president gave a farewell press conference, where he said: "The intelligence community's conclusions regarding Russian hacking are not final." However, he expelled Russian diplomats, leaving his successor a new cold war. The intrigue against Trump "Russiagate" began.

                  About its consequences in “The Nation” Patrick Lawrence writes: "The ability of the President to pursue foreign policy, and not only as regards Russia, is now compromised.  Driven into a corner and having no choice, Trump just signed a law imposing new serious sanctions against Russia and the European companies working with her. Projects on pipelines, vital for the energy sector of Russia, have been closed. Such an amazing strike based on the economy of another nation is usually considered an act of war, we must not forget about it ... All parties agree that the relations between the United States and Russia are now as bad as they were at the time of the worst moments of the Cold War. The assumption that two nuclear powers separate are only two inches from a military conflict can no longer be rejected as a hyperbole."

                  I hope all the same, that the matter is not so tragic. But to deal with serious world problems, such as the world Jihad, or the North Korean madman brandishing an atomic bomb, demanding the cooperation of the US and Russia, heavy damage is done. Yes and the impact on the economic well-being of Russia on the basis of a fictitious accusation of hacking is simply unethical.

                  The situation in American politics is now extremely strange. After the revelations, the Congress, which almost unanimously voted for the punishment of Russia's hacking with heavy sanctions, and the media, for 8 months already, as in an epileptic seizure, it is taking foam out of its mouth about "Russiagate", they can’t suddenly admit insolvency. The flagship of progress in the United States “The New York Times” on August 13^th , in an article by Yale Professor S. Moin and Oxford’s D. Priestland, offers a way to retreat: "There are certainly proofs of Russian interference in elections, and hacking DNC (written 5 days after the publication of “The Nation”).  It’s serious.  But this is hardly a long-term threat to American democracy on the part of any fifth column, with the support of Moscow's "authoritarian international" and its fake news. Even if it were true that President Putin is trying to organize an anti-liberal putsch, he is still far from achieving this goal. Only the fear that the republic is in immediate danger explains why paranoia has become the dominant response."

                  The meaning of this nonsense: breathe deeply; forget about our paranoia about "Russiagate". But how can one forget it? What to do with DNC, which has plunged the country into this madness? In America there are not too many parties, Democrats will not be dissolved. The special prosecutor Müller is already conducting searches and interrogating suspects, no matter what. And special prosecutors, like bull terriers, keep their jaws tightly clenched. 

                  I can’t predict the outcome of the drama unfolding in America. We do live in interesting times.

                                                                    Translated by Alla Axelrod August 17, 2017

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 [A1]Famous Russian writer, publicist. philosopher, humorist.